At the start of last year, round about bathtime, my daughter observed that a great many bands (at these those with which she was acquainted at the time) seemed to be "all-boys". I acknowledged, rather sadly, that this was indeed the case. Whereas I could name a plethora of all-male bands, and probably several with a mixture of male and female, I couldn't come up with many that were all-female.
Thus began last year's listening project - working my way through Wikipedia's list of all-female bands, with the aim of listening to all of the albums by each one that I could reasonably find.
I relied on Wikipedia to have a reasonably accurate discography of each artist, and generally aimed to stick to studio albums (i.e. not singles or live albums) except in cases where there was very little material, or it was out-of-print. My main source of music was Spotify, falling back to searching on YouTube for albums which couldn't be found on Spotify. I post all of the things I listen to in the "now listening" channel on our work Slack, and according to a Slack scraping thing I wrote for fun a few years ago the full project involved listening to around 978 individual works.
I like to think I listen to a lot of music, but I was surprised how few of these artists I'd heard of beforehand. It doesn't take a genius to suggest that the music industry being heavily male-dominated probably has something to do with this. Maybe there's something about an independently-minded all-female group playing their own instruments which scares male music executives?
Another thought which struck me was how sad it was that some of this work should be so hard to find. We live in an age of digital music and streaming, and it is easy to assume that the entire output of recorded music should be at our fingertips, but it clearly isn't. There are loads of things which don't appear to exist on Spotify, and some which clearly never had any kind of official digital release, and exist online solely as rips from vinyl. Possibly the master tapes of many of these records have long since been lost, or degraded, or destroyed - it is always sad to spot the coda to the Wikipedia article about an artist noting that they lost work in the 2008 Universal Studios fire. I feel there should be some concerted effort made by international organisations to preserve this kind of thing - we can look after great paintings that are hundreds of years old, but evidently can't take care of artworks that were produced in living memory.
Anyway, it was a worthwhile project and I'm glad I did it, because it has brought lots of music to my attention that would otherwise have passed me by, and my collection of Spotify "favourites" has been greatly expanded. The list included bands from all over the world (as a colleague pointed out in a Slack chat, there are quite a few all-female rock / metal bands from Japan, also bands from Norway, Argentina, Canada, Greece...)
Here's a Spotify Playlist I compiled from some of the things I "favourited" as I went along, three of which I performed at open-mic tonight. Happy listening!